Steve King: Defunding or bust

Rep. Steve King says House Republicans should stick together and vote against any long-term spending agreement that doesn’t block funding for President Barack Obama’s health care law — even if it leads to a government shutdown.

And if that doesn’t work, he says, they should try it again when it’s time to raise the debt ceiling this spring.

“You know that they’re like Santa’s elves in there, 24/7, energetically implementing Obamacare to get it in place, so they can expand this dependency class in America and get the roots of that malignant tumor down so deep that we can’t get ahold of it and pull it out,” King said. “That’s why I think we need to do it now.”

Obama signed the legislation into law nearly a year ago — on March 23, 2010 — and King wants to do everything he can to make sure it doesn’t have a second anniversary. The Iowa Republican has been one of the most vocal advocates of repealing the law, and he was the author of two amendments in the House-passed spending bill that block the Department of Health and Human Services from spending money to carry it out.

Now, King and Michele Bachmann of Minnesota — who has been sounding alarms about “secret” funding in the law — are trying a new tactic to knock it out. They’re rounding up signatures from other House Republicans for a letter to the GOP leadership warning that they’ll vote against any spending agreement that doesn’t shut down those funds — roughly $105 billion in appropriations that are automatically provided in the law.

“The more people that will sign on to a letter that will say that, the more there are, the stronger our position is and the more likely our leadership is to take that position, adopt it as their own and argue for it with Harry Reid and President Obama,” King said in the POLITICO interview.

It’s a long shot, because the House leadership and appropriators declined to write that language into the House spending bill the first time around. It would have required a change in the law, they said at the time, which House rules don’t allow them to do on appropriations bills. King tried to amend the bill on the House floor to strip out the automatic funds, but the amendment was ruled out of order.

Since then, however, King and Bachmann have rallied other Republicans to raise questions about those funds, which King says will allow the administration to “implement and enforce Obamacare, whether or not Congress ever appropriates another dollar.”

Democrats argue that those kinds of mandatory appropriations aren’t unusual and have been used by Republicans in the past, notably in the 2003 legislation that created the Medicare prescription drug benefit. But King said the way they’re used in the health care law is “completely unprecedented in order of magnitude.”